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Wednesday, 13 March 2013

Them Versus Us: Japanese and International Reporting of the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis

Them Versus Us: Japanese and International Reporting of the Fukushima Nuclear
Crisis

David McNeill

On April 7, 2011 as
Japan tottered back to its feet from the March 11th calamity, I chaired a press
conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) by
Higashikokubaru Hideo, then a candidate for Tokyo’s gubernatorial election. A famous
comedian before he entered politics, Higashikokubaru was uncharacteristically
somber as he discussed what Japan must do to recover from the terrible damage
inflicted by the triple disaster. A major problem, he intoned, was the
non-Japanese reporting of the nuclear crisis in Fukushima. “Do you think we foreign
journalists have done a bad job of reporting the disaster?” I asked him and he
turned, unsmiling, to face me full on for the first time. ‘Yes, I do,” he said.

That stinging rebuke in the venerated sixty-year-old home of the
foreign press in Japan epitomized criticism of American and European
journalists in the month after March 11. Japan’s foreign ministry led the
criticism of “excessive” coverage in April, singling out the Blade, a local US newspaper from
Toledo, Ohio, that ran a cartoon
depicting three mushroom clouds, one each for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and
Fukushima.[1]Newsweek Japan was one of several publications
to take up the cudgel against shrill, alarmist gaijin reporters.[2] “The
foreign media in Japan…has been put on a pedestal as the paragon of journalism,
and was viewed as a source of credibility. The Great East Japan Earthquake
shattered that myth,” thundered editor Yokota Takashi. “The Western media
failed to fulfill its mission during the disaster, hitting new lows with shoddy
journalism as reporters were overtaken by the news and lost their composure.”

Yokota accused foreign journalists of gross sensationalism after the first explosion at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, which
quickly turned the story into “Japan’s Chernobyl,” lamented Newsweek – a week before the Japanese
government indeed officially raised Fukushima to INES Level 7 – the same as the
1986 Ukraine disaster. The Wall Street
Journal also noted the ‘gulf’ that Fukushima opened up in reporting, noting
that while local journalists gave the sense that the “situation will be
resolved,”
their foreign counterparts focused “on the other side – that this is getting
out of control.”[3]
In the week after the nuclear crisis erupted, Japan-based bloggers assembled a
‘wall of shame’, citing dozens of foreign crimes against journalism, including
an infamous report in the UK tabloid Sun,
calling Tokyo a ‘city of ghosts.’[4]
The Sun reporter had never set foot
in Japan.

It is worth noting that such hyperbolic reporting was not all
imported. One of the most criticized examples was Japanese: AERA magazine’s famous March 19th
cover story showing a masked nuclear worker and the headline “radiation is
coming to Tokyo” was controversial enough to force an apology and the
resignation of at least one columnist (though the headline was in fact correct).[5] Moreover,
once the dust from the crisis settled, weekly Japanese magazines quickly sank
their teeth into the nuclear industry and its administrators far more aggressively then the foreign media ever did. Shūkan Shinchō dubbed the management of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) ‘senpan’(war criminals).Shūukan
Gendai named and shamed the most culpable ofJapan’s elite pro-nuclear scientists, calling
themgoyō
gakusha, (government lackeys)and “tonchinkan” – roughly meaning
“blundering idiots.” Other
magazines turned their critical gaze on the radiation issue, exposing
government malfeasance and lies. AERA also revealed that local governments
manipulated public opinion in support of reopening nuclear plants.

The Fukushima disaster revealed one of the major
fault lines in Japanese journalism, between the mainstream newspapers and
television companies – hereafter“big media” – and the less inhibited
mass-selling weeklies and their ranks of freelancers. The subject was new but
the debate it amplified on the influence of the press club system had been going on for decades.
As Laurie Anne Freeman and others[6]
have noted, the system means that Japan’sbig newspapers and TV
companies channel information directly from the nation’s political, bureaucratic and corporate elite to the
media and the public beyond; in this case from the government, TEPCO and the
Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency. The system’s critics say it locks Japan’s
most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources
and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis and criticism.That certainly seemed to happen here. Foreign correspondents
of course had no such restrictions, but nor did they have direct access to key
sources.

The large swathe of journalism outside this
official system is a different matter entirely. As Gamble and Watanabe have
pointed out in an often less than flattering survey of the weekly media, the
weeklies developed after the war partly in response to the feeling among
Japan’s growing urban middle-class that they were getting a selective, pro-establishment
line from big media.[7]
One of the key distinctions across the fault-line is that unlike their big
media counterparts, magazine journalists are not allowed access to the press
clubs. The consequences of this distinction would become clear in reporting on
the Fukushima aftermath, as I will show later.

One problem with the foreign mediawas its lack of knowledgeable personnel in Japan. After the disaster many journalists were dispatched to Japan who had no knowledge of the
country. The resulting inaccurate or unbalanced
reportingwas criticized by local foreigners as well as Japanese. Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at
Temple University’s Japan Campus, was one of several critics who cited the “many
egregious instances of…exaggeration and misrepresentation,” fueled by what he
called “parachute journalism.”[8]
For years, Japan’s dreary, protracted economic decline had been a turnoff to
distant editors, and the country had fallen off the media radar, eclipsed by
fast-rising China. FCCJ hacks sometimes joked darkly that it would take a major
disaster to revive Japan’s newsworthiness. Disaster had duly arrived, and there
weren’t enough reporters to cover it.

It
is also worth pointing out that many foreign journalists praised their Japanese
counterparts. Washington Post correspondent Chico Harlan singled out public
service broadcaster NHK’s restrained, almost “adjective free” coverage in a
widely circulated opinion piece: “Anchors do not use certain words that might
make a catastrophe feel like a catastrophe,” he wrote. “‘Massive’ is
prohibited.” Martyn Williams, a former president of the Foreign Correspondents’
Club of Japan, favorably noted the more sober domestic coverage, adding that
Japan’s media had “a duty” to avoid causing panic. “You can bet some of the
media running the scare stories about Japan wouldn’t handle a similar disaster
in their own country in the same way.”[9]

By far the most unrestrained criticism of Japanese journalism came
from Japanese commentators. Author and freelancer Uesugi Takashi was one of
several who accused the local media of colluding with the government and Tokyo
Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the stricken nuclear plant, to lie
and hide information. “TEPCO is a client of the media and the press clubs, being
one of their biggest advertisers – so the press won’t…say certain things,” he
said, citing their blackout of the meltdown that occurred in reactors 1 to 3,
and the fact that the latter had a heavy payload of lethal plutonium. Such statements
were enough, he claimed, to get him banned from TBS Radio in April.[10] Former
Washington TBS Bureau Chief Akiyama Toyohiro, who owned a farm in Fukushima,
made a similar assessment. “The mass media, it seemed to us, was just acting as
a mouthpiece for the government and the power company.”[11]

It
is obviously misleading to suggest that the government, TEPCO and big media
were all huddled in the same room plotting to keep the Japanese public in the
dark. Prime Minister Kan Naoto had several well-publicized disputes with the utility
and indeed was the victim of an attempted smear when TEPCO said his March 12
inspection of the Fukushima plant had delayed venting and caused the hydrogen
explosions. And journalists at TEPCO’s televised press conferences were often sharply critical of the company in the weeks after the crisis began.

Nevertheless, there is strong evidence for claims of
structural bias. Japan’s power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan’s
biggest advertiser, spending 88 billion yen (roughly US$ 1 billion) a year,
according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute.[12]
TEPCO’s 24.4 billion yen alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as
Toyota spends in a year. Many supposedly neutral journalists were tied to the
industry in complex ways: Senior Yomiuri editorial
and science writer Nakamura Masao, for example, was an advisor to the Central
Research Institute of Electric Power Industry; journalists from the Nikkei and Mainichi newspapers went on to work for pro-nuclear organizations
and publications.[13]
Before the Fukushima crisis began, TEPCO’s largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential
critics. According to Shūkan Gendai magazine,
the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising
with the Asahi newspaper. It’s
quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers.[14]That industry financial
clout, combined for decades with the press club system, surely helped discourage
investigative reporting and keep concerns about nuclear power and critics of dangerous
plants like Hamaoka and Fukushima well below the media radar.[15]

As a stringer for two daily European newspapers (The Independent of the UK, and The Irish Times), I was often singed from the heat in this debate. In
the course of four trips to Fukushima, over 100 newspaper articles and dozens
of radio interviews in the month after the crisis began, I struggled like all
other correspondents to give my audience a clear picture of the nuclear crisis,
while avoiding the twin traps of complaisant and alarmist reporting. Every
story on Fukushima or the fallout was followed by angry comments and letters
demanding more ‘balanced’ reporting, often coming from diametrically opposed
positions. Consider for example the following samples from the 34 comments
provoked by an article about radiation fears in Tokyo in the March 16 edition
of The Independent, in which I
mentioned the widespread rumor that the emperor had left Tokyo:[16]‘Some have heard that the Emperor has abandoned the city
for Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital, though there is no evidence that it is
true. “That's not what concerns me,” said Yutaka Aoki, a taxi driver who works
the area around Shibuya Station. “My biggest problem is getting petrol.’”

Comment One: “This article is scaremongering, possibly
more aimed at strengthening UK readers’ opposition to nuclear power rather than
painting an accurate picture of what's happening in Tokyo.”

Comment Two: “I live in Tokyo.
Shibuya is exactly as the article says…The danger is not just a big earthquake,
it is the very real possibility of complete nuclear meltdown at the plant in
Fukushima which will most definitely be a catastrophe of a magnitude that will
impact Tokyo citizens.”

Comment Three: “You lying pommie bastards. The emperor has not left Tokyo.
There are no thousands fleeing Tokyo either. Of course you
"journalists" are masking the lies you make up as "somebody
heard" or similar weasel words.”

Comment Four: “All the top-boy journalists have found a wonderful opportunity
to make themselves a nice bit of cash by peddling yet more sensationalist crap.
No matter how "Independent" a media source is, there is always
someone, somewhere trying to push their own agenda and make money from the
misery of others.

Comment Five: “’Making money out of the misery of others.’ You must be talking
about the politicians and the owners of the nuclear plants that were poorly
constructed in a known earthquake zone, within range of a tsunami. How many
paid stooges is the nuclear industry using to blanket the news with lies and
deception in order to keep the power flowing and the money coming?”

Accusations of rumormongering were partly a product of restricted
access. As Uesugi notes, unlike their Japanese counterparts, foreign reporters
were denied press time with the government’s top figures: Prime Minister Kan
Naoto, chief cabinet spokesman Edano Yukio and nuclear crisis minister Hosono Goshi. Those men were in the best
position to explain what was going on which, as it turns out, was worse than The
Independent had dared write: Kan later admitted that his “worst-case
scenario” during the first 10 days of the crisis was evacuating the entire
population of Tokyo.[17] Even New
York Times reporter Tabuchi Hiroko was among those who were swatted away. “We constantly asked for an interview with Kan,
especially when we were criticized for misreporting. We said: ‘Ok then, so give
us the top man and let us know what’s going on.’ We finally got Hosono after
two months.”[18] Foreign reporters could watch Edano daily on Japanese
TV but they couldn’t ask him questions.

In Fukushima itself, however, at least until
the government made it illegal in late April to enter the 20-km irradiated
evacuee zone, access was almost unlimited. On the morning of March 12, less
than 24 hours after the earthquake struck, I set off with two colleagues before
we knew anything about the nuclear accident. When we learned that Japanese
reporters were able to travel the closed expressways along with Self-Defense
Force troops and emergency relief workers, we negotiated with the police a pass
that allowed us toll-free access to the whole northeast. In the following
month, I would report from Iwaki, Iitate, Soma, Minami-Sōma, and right to the
gates of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant without being stopped by a single policeman. In
early April, when I drove around the almost abandoned town of Futaba, 2 km from
the plant, talking to local people who had stayed behind, masked policemen in
patrol cars asked me to leave “for my own safety” but otherwise left me alone. This
was the only way to understand life inside the irradiated zone of the world’s worst
nuclear crisis in 25 years, and locals there told immensely poignant stories, expressing
bewilderment and anger at their fate at the hands of a plant that didn’t
deliver a single watt of electricity to Fukushima. In an echo of Bhopal,
Chernobyl and other accidents steeped in epic corporate hubris, they felt they had
been manipulated, lied to and finally abandoned by TEPCO. Still, some were
determined to stay rather than abandon houses and farms that had been in their
families, in some cases since the Meiji era.

I’ve tried in this brief sample of the
voluminous coverage of the disaster to show that that reporting was shaped by
structural rather than national or international factors, and that analysis or
commentary that simply condemns “foreign” or “Japanese” reporting is
inadequate. Shut out from official sources and not subject to the discipline or
constraints of employment with Japan’s big media, Japanese freelancers and
non-Japanese journalists were forced to report in very different ways. I will
attempt to show this in more detail now by recalling the reporting I saw and did on
the nuclear crisis while in Fukushima Prefecture, focusing on two key stories: Minami-Sōma and the evacuation of
the 20-km exclusion zone around the nuclear plant.

Reporting Minami-Sōma

The center of Minami-Sōma
is about 25 km north of the exclusion zone, which cuts into its natural
hinterland to the south. More than 71,000 people lived in the city before March
11th. By the end of the month there were fewer than 10,000. The earthquake and
tsunami killed or left missing about 920; the remainder fled from the threat of
radiation, according to Mayor
Sakurai Katsunobu, who recalled looking out the fourth-floor window of the city
offices on 14 March, hours after a hydrogen explosion ripped apart Daiichi
reactor building No.3. “Cars clogged the street below as everyone packed up and
left. I thought it was the end of the town.”[19](車は毎日渋滞だった。皆は出ってしまい。この街はおしまいだと思った)

Two days before, after the first hydrogen
explosion in reactor 1 on March 12, journalists
working for Japan’s big media quietly pulled out of the town en masse. The
evacuation included all the major newspaper dailies and broadcasters, including
the Mainichi,Asahi and Yomiuri, as
well as the Sendai-based Kahoku Shinpō newspaper. The journalists pulled back to
Sendai, Fukushima city and other areas considered safe from the (then
unconfirmed) radiation fallout. None thought to inform the mayor. They returned some forty days later, by which
time a steady stream of foreign and freelance reporters had been to see the
town (AFP was the first to arrive, on March 18th). “The Japanese
journalists informed us later that their companies told them to leave, and they
stayed away until the government and their companies said the radiation had
fallen to safe levels.”[20] The
decision, he says, significantly worsened the situation for the town. “We were
abandoned so there was no way to tell the country or the world what was
happening.”

After March 12, regular deliveries of food and fuel began to dwindle and the citizens of Minami-Sōma were slowly left to
fend for themselves. Information about the state of the power plant was gleaned
from the television, mainly NHK, which relied on openly pronuclear experts to
explain what was happening to its six reactors. The most prominent and heavily
rotated was Sekimura Naoto, a vice dean of the Graduate School of Engineering
at the University of Tokyo and a consultant with METI’s Advisory Committee on
Energy and Natural Resources. Sekimura previously wrote reports verifying the
structural soundness of the Fukushima plant (his job was to assess the impact
of ageing and seismic stress), and had signed off on a ten-year extension for the No.1 reactor.[21] The
comments of other pro-nuclear scientists were also heavily reported, notably Madarame Haruki, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety
Commission of Japan – to the exclusion of alternative voices.

Most of Sekimura’s on-air comments reflected his
close ties to the industry and were, he admitted later, regurgitated from his
contacts inside TEPCO. “Residents near the power station should stay calm,” he
said on March 12, shortly before the first hydrogeexplosion. “Most of the fuel
remains inside the reactor, which has stopped operation and is being cooled.”
In fact, as TEPCO would admit two months later, the uranium fuel inside the No. 1 reactor had by this state already
completely melted. “A major radioactive disaster is unlikely,” Sekimura said. A
short time later, the explosion destroyed the concrete building housing reactor
1, irradiating the surrounding countrywide and sea, and eventually fording the evacuation of at least
80,000 people. “The people of our town didn’t believe what they were hearing or
seeing on TV,” Mayor Sakurai recalled six months later. “They made up their own
minds.”

In an October postmortem of NHK’s March/April
coverage, Ogi Noriyuki,
head of broadcasting during the Tohoku disaster, said of the nuclear crisis:

Kensho:
Higashi Nippon Dai Shinsai to Media,”Galac, October 2011.

“Overwhelmingly
the problem was lack of information. Even TEPCO and the government didn’t know
the whole picture. We didn’t have enough time to evaluate their reports and so
we didn’t know how far we should go in telling the dangers of the situation. We
were relying on TEPCO and the government and because they were not sure, we
were not sure.”[22]

Ogi said NHK had gone above and beyond the call of duty: “On the afternoon of
March 12th, the police only reported that the sound of an explosion
had been heard. TEPCO, NISA[23] and the
government said nothing. Looking at the screen, our reporter noticed what was
happening and said, ‘Just in case, anyone who is outside please go inside and
stay out of the rain.’ Even though we didn’t have any proof, we went further
than we needed to.”[24]

He added, however, a crucial, if obscurely worded caveat about
NHK’s exclusive dependence for information on the officials trying to solve –
and manage – the crisis. “It is being asked whether it is reallyOK for our monitoring
system to only depend on government sources.” Others have expressed much
sharper criticism about how nuclear critics were excluded from the analysis. “It
was very clear how NHK brought out pro-nuclear professors in force after the
earthquake struck,” said Anzai Ikuro, a radiation specialist and former
professor at the University of Tokyo’s nuclear engineering department. “Critics
like myself were not called on at all during the crisis.” Eventually, he and
other long-term critics such as Kyoto University researcher Koide Hiroaki[25] would gain a large following among the public, a
slim reward perhaps for being left in the cold for so long by the mass media.

In the week after the
crisis erupted, in fact, there was just one notable appearance on TV by an
academic who speculated that a meltdown had occurred.Fujita Yuko, an ex-professor of physics at
Keio University, told Fuji TV on the evening of March 11 he was “very
concerned” that the reactors were in a “state of meltdown.”He was never asked back.“I
speculate that it was because the station management thought Fujita spoke too
much on the danger of the nuclear accident,” said Ito Mamoru, who published a
book in 2012 surveying media coverage of the nuclear crisis.[26]

Immediately after the March 12 explosion, Mayor Sakurai and his
staff watched Edano host a press conference. “Even though the No. 1 reactor building is
damaged, the containment vessel is undamaged,” the Chief Cabinet Secretary told
reporters. “In fact, the outside monitors show that the [radiation] dose rate is
declining, so the cooling of the reactor is proceeding.”[27] Any
suggestion that the accident would reach Chernobyl level was, he said, “out of
the question.” Author and nuclear critic Hirose Takashi noted afterwards: “Most
of the media believed this and the university professors
encouraged optimism. It makes no logical sense to say, as Edano did, that the
safety of the containment vessel could be determined by monitoring the radiation
dose rate. All he did was repeat the lecture given him by TEPCO.” As media
critic Takeda Tōru later wrote, the overwhelming strategy throughout the
crisis, by both the authorities and big media, seemed to be reassuring people,
not alerting them to possible dangers.[28]

Sakurai was left reeling from the impact of
the nuclear disaster. His remaining constituents, including many elderly and
bedridden people, faced starvation. Television reporters occasionally called
from Fukushima city or Tokyo for updates but with so many other stories
clamoring for attention, there seemed no way to impress on them how desperate
the situation was. There would be no direct word from TEPCO on the state of the
Daiichi plant for 22 days. Elsewhere in this collection of essays, Charles
McJilton describes being rebuffed by Sakurai’s staff when his organization,
Second Harvest, offered food aid to the city, an incident we can interpret
either as an indicator of the reflex response to foreign ‘charity’ among
Japanese organizations, or simple bureaucratic disorganization. In any event,
late on March 24 the mayor sat in front of a camcorder in his office and
recorded an 11-minute video that was uploaded to YouTube with English
subtitles. “We are not getting enough information from the government and Tokyo
Electric Power Co.," said the exhausted looking Sakurai. "Convenience
stores and supermarkets where people buy everyday goods are closed. Citizens
are almost being driven into starvation…I beg you to help us.”[29] The
video, perhaps the most striking attempt of the entire Tohoku disaster to
bypass the mainstream media, registered more than 200,000 hits in the following
week and attracted tons of aid. It also drew a stream of freelance Japanese and
foreign reporters who made Sakurai an emblematic figure of the grassroots challenge to blundering and incompetent officialdom during the disaster.

When I arrived on April 4, Sakurai was still
stinging from his experience with the Japanese media. “I appreciate that there
were dangers but we had many people who stayed behind and in my view the journalists should have stayed too. They
completely ignored us and left to protect themselves. That’s not the mission of
journalism.”[30]
What struck him about the Minami-Sōma episode is how the Japanese journalists acted
together, like a retreating army. Speaking anonymously, a reporter for one of
the major newspapers said he and his colleagues were left with no choice once
they were told to leave. “There was some discussion but in the end we agreed
that it would be safer to report from Fukushima city.” There was no conscious
collective decision. It happened almost by osmosis. When they returned, he
added, Mayor Sakurai had berated them. “He said the foreign media and freelancers
came in droves to report what happened. What about you?”

The reporting of the Minami-Sōma story demonstrated
some striking differences in how foreign and large Japanese media organizations
operated, particularly the discipline and homogeneity of the Japanese press
corps. Masuyama Satoru, a director with NHK’s Science and Culture Division, explains the decision
to pull out of Minami-Sōma thus: “It’s a case of individual responsibility versus
corporate responsibility.[31] Reporters
at a Japanese company will not take risks by themselves; they will wait for
instructions. And the company will not send its workers off without proper
preparation or protective gear. It’s a nuisance but that’s how it is.” Many
critics would later question why none of the big media broke ranks in the
interests of their readers. "I subscribe
to four major national newspapers, but I cannot tell which newspaper I am
reading in relation to articles about the nuclear accident,” Uchida Tatsuru, a
professor at Kobe College, told the Asahi.[32]
“Not only is there no attempt to bring out a unique angle, there is also a
sense of fear at reporting something different from the other papers and the
feeling of security from running the same articles. That has led to anger among
readers who see a repeat of what happened during World War II."

Reporting inside the 20-km evacuee zone

By late March, the war in Libya had knocked Japan from the front
pages of the world’s newspapers but there was still one story that was very
sought after: life inside the 20km zone around the power plant. The government
had steadily strengthened this zone from advising evacuation on March 11 to ordering evacuation for 70-80,000 people later that
week, while another 136,000 people in the zone 20-30km away were told to stay in their homes. The government
directive was widely criticized by Fukushima residents and some sections of the
media as arbitrary and unscientific. Eventually, several highly irradiated
villages outside the zone would also be evacuated, such as Iitate (see Tom Gill’s paper in this collection). Most of those people had fled and left
behind homes, pets and farm animals that would eventually die. There were
claims that hospitals had abandoned patients.[33] Animal
corpses had been left to rot. A small number of mainly elderly people stayed
behind, refusing to leave homes that had often been in their families for
generations. Not surprisingly, there was enormous global interest in their
story and its disturbing echoes of the Chernobyl catastrophe 25 years earlier.

In late March, a
trickle of foreign journalists braved radiation inside the zone. Newsweek’s Joshua Hammer described it as
the “Twilight Zone crossed with The Day After – an
apocalyptic vision of life in the nuclear age.”[34] Daniel
Howden, from my own newspaper, The
Independent, drove right to the gates of the plant, encountering deserted
homes, stray pets and nervous nuclear workers along the way.[35] But he
was unable to find interviewees inside the zone, so a few days later I followed
him and talked to several holdouts.[36] None of
us encountered a single Japanese reporter inside the exclusion zone, despite
the fact that it was not yet illegal to be there. Some would begin reporting
from the area much later, after receiving government clearance – the Asahi sent its first dispatch on April 25 when its reporters
accompanied the commissioner general of the National Police Agency.[37] Later, they
would explain why they stayed away and – with the exception of approved
government excursions – continued to stay away. “Journalists are employees and
their companies have to protect them from dangers,” explained Satō Keiichi, a
deputy editor with the News Division of Nippon TV. “Reporters like myself might
want to go into that zone and get the story, and there was internal debate about
that, but there isn’t much personal freedom inside big media companies.
We were told by our superiors that it was dangerous, so going in by ourselves
would mean breaking that rule. It would mean nothing less than quitting the
company.”[38]

Here we come to some important structural differences between Japanese and overseas news
organizations. Outside Japan, foreign correspondents are increasingly retained by newspapers on
casual contracts or as stringers, reflecting both shrinking budgets and the
declining importance of all but a handful of must-have global stories. Of the
foreign reporters I worked with in March, I can think of only a handful who were staff
correspondents. Reporters like Hammer and Howden, brought over from their
normal beats (in the Middle East and Africa) precisely for their skills and
bravery in difficult assignments, are under a lot of unspoken pressure to
justify the expense of getting them there. They are expected to use their
skills of interpretation and analysis in situations where they don’t always
know what is going on. In addition, their stories are bylined, bringing a
certain amount of individual glory in the event of a scoop. That background,
the reporters’ lack of specific knowledge about nuclear power and their
unfamiliarity with Japan, helps explain sensationalist dispatches of the kind
that so upset Higashikokubaru.

In contrast, reporters
for Japan’s big media are generally staffers, usually embedded in organizations
with a strict line of command and lifetime employment. As Jochen Legewie points
out, the emphasis at these companies is on a descriptive, fact-based style
relying on official sources. Investigative reporting is limited and the
individual reputation of each reporter is considered less important than those
of their Western counterparts.[39] Most of
the stories carried in the Japanese newspapers are not bylined. In practice,
this means that the best investigative reporting in Japan is often done by
freelancers, such as Watai Takeharu and Kamata Satoshi.[40]

It is not difficult from this context to see two very different
dynamics at work. Unlike their foreign counterparts, Japanese reporters for the
big media had little to gain from breaking ranks and disregarding government
warnings on the dangers of reporting close to the nuclear plant. Moreover, the
cartel-like behavior of the Japanese companies meant they did not have to fear
being trumped by rivals.[41][42] In
particularly dangerous situations, managers of TV networks and newspapers will
form agreements (known as “hōdō kyōtei”)
in effect to collectively keep their reporters out of harm’s way. Teddy Jimbo, founder of the pioneering Internet
broadcaster Video News Network, explains: “Once the five or six big firms come
to an agreement with their competitors not to do anything, they don’t have to be worried
about being scooped or challenged.”[43] Jimbo
says the eruption of Mount Unzen in 1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both of
which led to fatalities among Japanese journalists, copper-fastened these
agreements – one reason why so few Japanese reporters can be seen in recent
conflict zones such as Burma, Thailand or Afghanistan. The Times’ Asia Bureau Chief Richard Lloyd Parry, who has reported
from all those conflicts, sums up his observations thus: “Japanese journalists
are among the most risk-averse in the world.”[44]

Frustrated by the lack of information from around the plant, in the end Jimbo took his
camera and dosimeters into the 20-km zone on April 2 and like Sakurai, uploaded
a report on YouTube that scored almost 1 million hits.[45] He was
the first Japanese reporter to bring television images from Futaba and other
abandoned towns, though those images never made it onto broadcast TV in Japan –
though images from the zone, shot during government-approved incursions, would later appearon regular TV news) “For
freelance journalists, it’s not hard to beat the big companies because you
quickly learn where their line is,” he said. “As a journalist I needed to go in
and find out what was happening. Any real journalist would want to do that.”[46] He
later sold some of his footage to three of the big Japanese TV networks: NHK,
NTV and TBS.

Japan’s state
broadcaster NHK has a network of 54 bureaus throughout Japan, thousands of
journalists, 14 helicopters and over 60 mobile broadcasting units. It reaches
50 million households and is among the most trusted sources in the world. Throughout
the disaster, it was striking how it was a key source of information, always
flickering on screens in the corner of hotels, restaurants, shelters. “If you rolled ABC, NBC
and CBS News together you’d have something equivalent to the place of NHK in
Japanese media,” Ellis Krauss, a professor of Japanese politics and
policymaking at the University of California told the Washington Post in March.[47] With
that network, and its exclusive access to disaster information, NHK did a
superb job of simply relaying information from government and corporate sources
but did less well in analyzing it, says Jimbo. “For two months they were
showing graphics on TV about what was happening. All they did was quote
experts, TEPCO and others from the ‘nuclear village.’ So that meant that
everything they showed was wrong.”

Conclusion

Exclusively singling out the foreign media as Higashikokubaru, Newsweek and Japan’s government all did
in the weeks after March 11 set up an unhelpful binary and perpetuated the soft
nationalism that was one of the more unfortunate side effects of the disaster. We stayed and did our job. They ran away. We can’t rely on them. I’ve
tried in this paper to question that simplistic notion, showing how journalists from all sides were subject to
structural constraints that affected their coverage. It makes as little sense
to single out the ‘foreign’ press for particular criticism of poor reporting as
it does to blame the entire Japanese media for being complacent, deferential
and too process-orientated. As we have seen, freelance Japanese journalists
were also frustrated at many aspects of big media reporting of the crisis,
while foreign commentators were deeply critical of the more sensationalist
“parachute” hacks.

I’ve cited some of the more striking examples of media manipulation, including the effective
blackout of taboo words like “meltdown” and “plutonium,” and the widespread use
of government-approved experts to spin the limited information leaking from the
Fukushima plant. The industry’s clout surely also helped suppress debate on
nuclear policy, though it is outside the scope of this paper to show exactly
how. One of the more striking features of the Japanese media, however, is its remarkable
self-regulation. It is puzzling to outsiders to see reporters for the largest
companies operating in apparent concert, as they seemed to do inside the 20-km
zone and in Minami-Sōma, disregarding what many foreign reporters would see as the
natural rules of competition – even if this means flouting or breaking
government rules.

Though now regularly compared to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986,
Fukushima was in at least one important way very different: it took place in a
country with an ostensibly free media. Reporters working during the dying days
of the old Stalinist system that ran the Soviet-controlled Ukraine were banned
from investigating or writing about Chernobyl. Scientists were placed under
house arrest or put in prison. There were no such restrictions in Fukushima,
making it a unique case for study.[48] We’re
still digesting the full implications of what took place in the weeks after
March 11 and what it tells us about how our media performed; I have only scratched the
surface here. One important consequence is that big media journalists have been
forced to acknowledge the anti-nuclear lobby after years of largely snubbing
it and underreporting the dangers of building so many reactors in one of the
planet’s most seismically unstable countries. Some grudgingly turned up to
report a September 19 anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo, one of the largest
on record, to hear freelancer Kamata Satoshi launch an angry tirade against
them. “Those journalists have become too
institutionalized,” he said. “They
cannot openly express their anger or fear because they are under pressure from
their bosses not to do so. We are all paying the price.”

[1]
Japan Criticizes Foreign Media’s Fukushima Coverage,” the Asahi, April 9, 2011. The Blade has a circulation of about
168,000 and ranked 77th in the US in 2011. http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0004420.html

[6] See
Freeman’s “Japan’s Press Clubs as Information Cartels,” Japan Policy
Research Institute, Working Paper No.18, April 1996. Available athttp://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp18.html
(October 6, 2011). Also see Closing the
Shop: Information Cartels and Japan’s Mass Media, Princeton University
Press (2000). Also, see DeLange, W., A
History of Japanese Journalism: Japan’s Press Club As the Last Obstacle to a
Mature Press, Routledge (1998).

[7]
Gamble, A., Watanabe, T., A Public
Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the
West, Regnery Publishing (2004)

[9]Personal
communication, April 3, 2011.For an
overview of foreign reporting of Fukushima, see Eric Johnston, The Tohoku Earthquake and
Tsunami, the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor, and How the World’s Media Reported Them
(Japan Times, 2011).

[15] See
Hirose, T., Fukushima Meltdown: The
World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Kindle edition (2011).
This is not to suggest that NHK and other media outlets completely ignored nuclear
power, just that the odds were heavily tilted against a balanced discussion.

[29] See
Fackler, M., “Japanese City’s Cry Resonates Around the World,” New York
Times, April 6, 2011. Also, McNeill., D., “A City Left to Fight for
Survival After the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” the Irish Times, April
9, 2011.

[40] See
Arita, A., “Rebel Spirit Writ Large,” The
Japan Times, Oct. 2, 2001. Available online at http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20111002x1.html
(Nov. 2, 2011).As I write, a scandal
involving hidden losses at the camera and optical equipment-maker Olympus is in
full flow. The scandal was broken by a tiny subscription-only magazine called
FACTA, whose editor Abe Shigeo quit his job at the Nikkei after being told to
spike a story on corruption in the securities industry. “There is no
investigative reporting at Japanese newspapers,” he said.

[43]
Personal interview, September 16, 2011. Most of the big newspapers and networks
in Japan also agreed early on to avoid using the word ‘meltdown’ （全炉心溶融）and settle for ‘partially melting’ (部分的溶融), although the decision was made after
a lot of debate. It will also be noticed that very little appeared in the
Japanese media about the plutonium fuel in reactor 3 of the Daiichi plant.

[48]
Interestingly, however, some Japanese magazines say that while the Soviet
government was criminally negligent in its first response to Chernobyl, it
later worked much harder than the Japanese authorities to move children away
from the irradiated zone. See Josei Seven,
May 26, 2011. Available online at http://www.news-postseven.com/archives/20110518_20367.html